Recipe | French Bread Pizza with Pesto & Sun-Dried Tomatoes

When you first move in with someone, you learn all sorts of little tidbits about that someone’s personality. Some of these things are endearing, while others, not so much.

After moving in with me, for example, I’m sure my husband wasn’t pleased to find out that I make up little songs about everything. Especially cats. And sometimes I like to sing obscure 80s songs replacing key words with my cats’ names. (“Miso likes to party all the time/Party all the time/Party all the tiiiiime”–come on, that’s not annoying at all, right?)

And I didn’t know about my husband’s deep, abiding love for junk food. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love some good junk food now and then too. But my husband? He is serious about the stuff. I find Cinnamon Toast Crunch and Cocoa Krispies hidden in the back of the pantry, behind boxes of Kashi and Erewhon. Pints of Ben & Jerry’s covered with bags of frozen green beans. One time I was looking for an envelope and while searching through his desk, I came upon a whole drawer full of Pop-Tarts. A whole drawer of them, all neatly stacked in their neon-colored, fruit-flavored glory.

Back when we first starting living together, before I really taught myself how to cook, we used to buy a lot of frozen meals and Chris always loaded up on French bread pizzas. This was fascinating to me because it wasn’t something I ever had before. Pizza? On bread? Crazy! But he got me started on them and soon I was buying them for myself all the time too, even though I knew they were probably not the best thing I could be eating.

These French bread pizzas are a little more sophisticated than the frozen kind, though. I used my frozen pesto instead of tomato sauce since I have a lot of it in the freezer, and then I topped the pizzas with homemade sun-dried tomatoes because I still have tomatoes ripening on the countertop from the summer. They’re easy, they taste good, and you don’t have to hide them in the freezer underneath the frozen vegetables.